“There are three important things in a mother’s life—the birth of her child, her daughter’s wedding day, and sorority rush,” Bill Alverson, a sorority-rush coach and the star of the Lifetime show A Sorority Mom’s Guide to Rush, likes to say. Lately, rush is bigger and more competitive than ever, driven by a boom in TikTok content detailing the process. Coaches like Alverson have begun offering their services to girls—and their mothers—desperate to get a bid from elite sororities, and these services don’t come cheap.
It may sound insane to hire someone to train your teenage daughter to talk to other teenage girls, but sorority rush, especially in the South, is a major undertaking. Parents invest in lots of kids’ activities; private coaching is now a common feature of competitive athletics. And getting their kids into the right sorority, parents believe, might help them make the kinds of connections that can get them job interviews someday. At my college, a rumor went around that one mother injured herself by falling out of a tree outside a sorority house—people said she’d been trying to get a peek at her daughter’s performance during the final round of rush. There are unspoken rules, secret ranking systems, decades of traditions to study, and some hard and fast dos and don’ts, according to Alverson: “You don’t talk about bucks; you don’t talk about boys; you don’t talk about booze,” he told me. “A lot of people say don’t talk about the Bible, but I don’t buy in to that one.” If church is important to you, he said, it’s okay to say that; just remember that “Jesus is not going through rush.”
Alverson hadn’t planned to become a rush coach. He was a lawyer in small-town Alabama when the local choir director asked him to help a girl train for a Junior Miss pageant. Alverson had done theater in the past and worked in retail, so he thought he could help her. “Well, we ended up winning,” he said. “It was this underdog success story.” His phone hasn’t stopped ringing since. By 2015, he was known as one of the country’s top pageant trainers and had his own reality show, Coach Charming. A few years ago, Alverson’s pageant girls started setting out for college. One of the moms asked if he’d help prep her daughter for sorority recruitment, and more and more followed.
He advises young women on what to wear: “Just a little touch of ‘We have this’” can be beneficial, he told me, about the significance of a David Yurman or Hermès bracelet. He doesn’t apologize for the materialism, which he sees as natural: Many people “make first impressions based upon how you present yourself. We know this by psychological studies.”
But the biggest part of coaching, he said, is training the women for the conversations they’ll have at rush, which essentially serve as interviews. High schoolers these days aren’t accustomed to public speaking or “cocktail-party conversation,” he told me, and struggle to pitch themselves. So he starts by having his clients lead conversations with waiters at restaurants. He’ll take the young women out shopping and have them chat with the store clerk. He reminds his clients to make sure they ask questions, and to really listen to the answers. He’ll quiz them after, asking what the clerk’s name was and what they discussed.
The most significant part is role-playing the conversations they’re going to have at rush: What’s your major? Why? How was your week? One important lesson is how to show the right amount of vulnerability in conversation. If someone compliments your dress, say to them, “Oh, thank you, I wasn’t sure,” or “Really? My mom picked it out for me.” He recommends saying, “I’m this major for now, but I’m not sure if it’s right for me.” And it’s always good to poke fun at your family—in a playful way. The point is to convey humility, that you’re not perfect.
Training with Alverson can cost some clients a thousand dollars or more. He typically charges by the hour, but he wouldn’t tell me how much. He said he sometimes offers discounts, but “to be real honest, if they don’t pay, they’re not committed.” Alverson has had mothers approach him asking, “How many openings do you have? Four? I’ll take them all.” They’re not just trying to get their daughters the extra training that could afford them a leg up; they’re trying to box out the competition.
To the naysayers (usually the girls’ fathers), Alverson argues that rushing a sorority is the female equivalent of joining a country club. “I have them come at me about the cost. ‘I can’t believe the girls are spending this.’ You’re a member of a hunting club. You’re paying $10,000 a year to have the right to go hunting. Do you play golf? Yes. So you really are paying money to have a social interaction,” he told me. “And you’re going to bitch about buying a pair of Tory Burch shoes for your daughter? Sit down.”
When I rushed at the University of Mississippi, in 2016, I assumed that it would be relatively easy to join the sorority I liked best. I was wrong.
On the first day, I wore my hair naturally wild, with curls. I remember thinking: I want them to like me just as I am. The girls next to me had thousands of dollars of David Yurman and Cartier Love bracelets stacked on their wrists. I looked down at the leather bracelet my sister had given me at Christmas. I thought about stuffing it into my pocket but was distracted by the onset of high-pitched chanting. A sea of pink poured out of the house.
I didn’t realize then that there were rules to these things, that every move meant something. The girls who were called first—referred to as “No. 1s”—were escorted through the sacred doors by legendary upperclassmen. One by one, names were called, until I was the only one waiting. Why didn’t I get a blowout?
“Annie Joy Williams?”
A petite brunette approached me with a look that signaled that she was both bored and had no idea who I was. I realized then that these were the major leagues, and I was a rookie.
Many of the women Alverson works with have family connections to the sorority system or the family wealth that can serve in place of those connections. But some of them are more like the girl I used to be. Alverson put me in touch with a former client named Hadley Drake, who’d worked with him in 2023 before landing at Alpha Delta Pi at the University of South Carolina.
Drake is from Gaffney, South Carolina, where the population is about a third of the University of South Carolina’s. In a town where everyone knows everyone, she’d never had to pitch herself. Her parents knew nothing about sorority life; neither had gone to college. When she brought up the possibility of joining a sorority, her mom thought it was natural to bring in a professional. “She was like, ‘Well, when you needed help with cheerleading, we would get you private lessons with your coach,’” so she did the same for sorority recruitment, Drake told me.
Drake had been concerned about appearing as a “country bumpkin,” but Alverson assured her that being a small-town southern girl was actually “her golden trait.” Alverson told me that his services benefit the girls he works with long after bid day. “A lot of my coaching really is life-skill coaching,” he said. Drake agrees. This summer, she landed a job as a page at the South Carolina State House. “In a job interview, I go back to my coaching with Bill nine times out of 10,” she told me.
Another rush coach, Leighton Newberry, told me that she has more and more clients for whom rush is a novel concept. Her Atlanta-based business, Recruitment Ready, just opened a New York City branch. “We’ve seen a big influx in families from the North sending their children to the South, which has been really interesting and kind of fun to work with,” she told me. (Before #BamaRush went viral in 2021, the number of female undergraduates at the University of Alabama had fallen for three years in a row. Now it’s risen to almost 20,000—the highest number on record.)
Newberry is originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, and rushed at Auburn University in 2015, landing a bid from a top house. Mothers from her hometown reached out, asking if she could help their daughters prepare for recruitment. After seeing those girls get coveted bids, she realized that she could turn her advice into a business.
Recruitment Ready offers one-on-one sessions starting at $175. Clients can sign up to text with Newberry or another coach during each day of recruitment. The most expensive package, called Bid Day and Beyond, costs $4,497. Coaching includes mock rush practices, styling, and social-media cleanup. (“We’re going through their account with them, and we’re saying, If you would not want the future sorority president, your boyfriend’s dad, or your great-aunt to see this photo, we’re gonna remove it,” Newberry told me.)
Newberry, like Alverson, encourages the girls to discuss their faith if it’s important to them. “You don’t have to change who you are,” she said. “I’m super passionate about that, because I want girls to find lifelong friends, well beyond recruitment week.” However, politics should be off the table: “Don’t talk about who you voted for in the last election.”
At the University of Mississippi, many people ask what sorority you’re in before they ask your name. Girls who don’t get a bid are referred to as GDIs—goddamn independents. By some divine intervention, the good women of Chi Omega saw past my recruitment faux pas and deemed me worthy of membership. Getting into a “top house” turned me from an anonymous out-of-state girl into somebody who mattered. Boys asked me to date parties. My sorority put me up for homecoming. And I met some of the best friends I’ve ever known. In return, I tried to fit in.
I hid the fact that I wasn’t wealthy behind clothes I couldn’t afford. I didn’t speak up against the antiquated voting system we used to score the girls going through rush, which factored in whether they were legacies, among other things. I didn’t talk about politics as much as I wanted to. It never sat right with me that two letters could make me matter so much more than I had without them. But they did.
The Greek system is obviously deeply flawed and deeply homogenous. Even if chapters try to become more welcoming, many women won’t want to rush if they don’t see members who look like them. And coaching can’t change that—no amount of conversational training will make someone thin or wealthy or white. At the end of the day, if coaching is just about the richest girls, driven by the most obsessive mothers elbowing out the competition, it won’t be good for anyone.
But perhaps all of the attention being directed at rush can help bring out what’s best about Greek life—the way it brings women together—and push the system in a more positive direction. Brandis Bradley, a lawyer and makeup artist with a popular RushTok account, sees the glaring flaws in the Greek system but believes that it’s worth fixing. She rushed but didn’t have the money to pay her dues. Now she follows and promotes young women who might not fall into the conventional sorority-girl camp, trying to “pluck girls from obscurity and financial lack.” Many of them go on to get bids. “I don’t celebrate and platform sorority life because I think it’s a perfect institution,” she told me; she does it because she sees the system’s potential. “How many opportunities does the world give us to rally around a big group of young women like this?”
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